Video: Avoiding the least-valuable-activity trap

Now that you've identified your most valuable activities, let's look at the other side of the equation, your least valuable activities, or your LVAs. Think about the relationship between your MVAs and your LVAs like a glass of water. An empty glass isn't empty, it's filled with air. This is the equivalent of your LVAs. As we fill the glass up with water, your MVAs, it becomes more valuable and it leaves less and less room for air, your LVAs.

Join author and business coach Dave Crenshaw as he shows you the key to enhancing your productivity—focusing on your most valuable activities and minimizing the distractions that waste your time. This course shows you how to determine where you make the most valuable contributions to your company while minimizing and offloading distractions. Create a plan to mind your time and effort and help coworkers and employees discover their most valuable activities, which can result in an office-wide productivity boost.

This course is one of a series of five Dave Crenshaw courses based on his Invaluable teaching methodology for professional development.

Avoiding the least-valuable-activity trap

Now that you've identified your most valuable activities, let's look at theother side of the equation, your least valuable activities, or your LVAs.Think about the relationship between your MVAs and your LVAs like a glass of water.An empty glass isn't empty, it's filled with air.This is the equivalent of your LVAs.As we fill the glass up with water, your MVAs, it becomes more valuable and itleaves less and less room for air, your LVAs.

As you spend more time in your MVAs the amount of time available for your LVAs decreases.However, most people are spending the majority of their time in their leastvaluable activities, naturally decreasing their value.We want to gradually increase the amount of MVAs over time, so that in the end,you have hardly any time at all for these least valuable activities.But LVAs are very powerful in their pull.It's much easier to spend your time doing least valuable activities.

Most anyone can do them and most anyone is willing to do them. These aresmall mundane tasks.The simple things like running errands at the store or printing out copies andwatching the printer roll. Even attending meetings can be an LVA if the meetingdoesn't have an important purpose.These kinds of activities take very little energy and effort.Contrast that with common MVAs, like building high-level relationships withpartner companies, or developing a long -term marketing strategy, these mostvaluable activities take more energy, effort and skill.

Here are a couple of tools to help you recognize when you're falling into aleast valuable activity trap and how to get yourself out.The first is to continually ask yourself the question, what is the value of this activity?This awareness will start to create a desire in you to not get sucked into these LVA traps.You may even want to keep track in your calendar of the value of each activitywhich you perform, just make a note of what you think each activity is worth interms of dollar per hour.

Next, we want to ask the question, why am I doing this activity?The why question will help you identify how you got into that LVA trap.Perhaps you just drifted into it or maybe the task was delegated to you.Many people don't reach their career goals, because they allow themselves to getblown around in the wind of the day.Rather than making conscious decisions about what they're doing with their time,they become purely reactive to requests from coworkers and events around them.

We need to become strategic about how to serve both others and our career andthat leads us to the third tool, which is to build a strategy to get out of LVA traps.In the next video, I'll help you build that strategy step-by-step.Remember, it may take more effort to stay out of these least valuableactivities, but the more you fill up your glass with MVAs the less room you'llhave for LVAs and the more valuable you'll become.

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